“We should be only advancing the money,” he explained; “and we should look to you to pay us back when you can. It’s quite a usual procedure with us, because it happens in perhaps six of our cases out of ten. I don’t have to point out to you,” he continued, with a smile, “what I’m always obliged to underscore with chaps like those in there, that if you don’t make good what we spend on your account the loss comes not on well-disposed charitable people who give of their abundance, but on poor men who steal from their own penury. The very breakfast you ate this morning was paid for in the main by fellows who are earning from twelve to twenty-five dollars a week, and have families to support besides.” I hung my head, trying to stammer out a promise of making good. “You see those boys in there? There are five of them, and two will probably stick to us. That’s about the proportion we keep permanently of all who come in. I don’t know which two they will be—you never can tell. Perhaps it will be the piano-mover and the Scotchman; perhaps the man they call Headlights and the Irishman; perhaps the little chap and some other one of them. But whichever they are they’ll chip in for the sake of the new ones we shall reclaim, and take on themselves the burden of the work.” The thought that for the comforts I had enjoyed that morning I was dependent on the sacrifice of men who had hardly enough for their own children made me redden with a shame I think he understood. “Their generosity is wonderful,” he went on, quietly; “and I tell it to a man like you only because you can appreciate how wonderful it is. It’s the fact that so much heart’s blood goes into this work that makes it so living. These fellows love to give. They love to have you take the little they can offer. You never had a meal at your own father’s table that was laid before you more ungrudgingly than the one you ate this morning. The men who provide it are doing humble work all over the city, all over the country—because we’re scattered pretty far and wide. And every stroke of a hammer, and every stitch of a needle, and every tap on a typewriter, and every thrust of a shovel, and every dig of a pick, and every minute of the time by which they scrape together the pennies and the quarters and the dollars they send in to us is a prayer for you. I suppose you know what prayer really is?” His glance was now that of inquiry. “I’d like to have you tell me, sir,” I answered, humbly. He smiled again. “Well, it isn’t giving information to a wise and loving Father as to what He had better do for us. It’s in trying to carry out the law of His being in doing things for others. That isn’t all of it, by any means; but it’s a starting-point. Spender tells me that that nice fellow Pyncheon brought you in. Well, then, every glass of soda-water Pyncheon draws is in its way a prayer for you, because the boy’s heart is full of you. Prayer is action—only it’s kind action.”